got a few screenshots of the beginning of my map, but i need some suggestions as to other things i could do to make it more interesting. i'll point out some of my known issues so you'll see what i mean.

this is were the player will start, at this helicopter landing pad. my concern here is the lighting. should there be more light stretching across the floor? should there be more of a gradient to the light?

this one is an image of the main courtyard. this is where i have most of my concerns. many of them are probably going to be up to me to fix, however the biggest one is the layout of the courtyard itself. i have alredy added some crates but i'm wondering if i should add more crates or do something different. and this shot also leads to another growing issue in screenshot 3.

what i was going for here was to make it look as if someone had been draged across the floor and slammed up agaisnts the crate. what i am wondering is does it look realistic enough?

also the ASHWALL background is only a temporary untill i come up with a better scene to use.

Looks good except the skulltag.wad textures, particularly the doors and the textures nearby them in shot 2...they look really out of place with the Doom/Doomy textures. (You know there is an official resource wad for this, right?)

Ordinarily I would suggest gradienting the lights, but with so many of them intersecting it'd get really complicated, and they look good as-is.

Maybe use one of the GRAY* flats instead of the 8x8 FLAT20 tiles in shot 1.

Shadow Dweller said:
my concern here is the lighting. should there be more light stretching across the floor? should there be more of a gradient to the light?

Yeah, I definitely agree with essel here.

Shadow Dweller said:
what i was going for here was to make it look as if someone had been draged across the floor and slammed up agaisnts the crate. what i am wondering is does it look realistic enough?

have been working on the map some more. adding things, changing things, and so on. here is some new screenshots.

the "new" retextured courtyard. i didn't really want to take out the gate, so i re-did the textures on it. personally i think it fits better now but i'll leave that for you guys to decide.

also during the retexurising, i lost the old crate texture with the blood on it. apparently it is not in the texture pack so i'll have to find a way to get it back in the map.

and i also added a fence seen faintly in the background by the doorway of the main structure

this is one of the rooms inside the stucture, the second one you'll enter during the course of the game. the stereotypical long dark hallway that i have seen in at least five or six different movies and games.

this is supposed to be some kind of examination room. not really a whole lot i can go on about with this room. hopfully i didn't go too crazy with the white/gray textures. this room is subject to change, maybe not drastically but there will be some minor adjustments.

I like your last two shots the most, those outdoor shots with the crates still needs work.That helipad in your first shot looks nice as well, try an different flat that gray 8x8 flat doesn't look nice.

I'm kind of on hold now, as far as this project is concerned. I've recently moved into my college apartment, so I'm a little unsettled at the moment. One of my major setbacks is, I've got a brand new laptop, but it runs on Windows Vista. So as soon as I find a patch to upgrade DoomBuilder I'll be back to work.

Before I left, I did do some work with the level, I can't remember if I changed anything, I haven't had time to look at the level in about a week. I did add on a little, I hope to have screenshots at sunrise, if not sometime soon.

I would also like to thank you guys for the help! Good luck with the project!

Edit:

New screenshots up!

It's nothing impressive yet, there is still much work to be done. I am going to insert more blood and damage in these two areas, so these are not yet complete, but I'd say it makes for a good point to stop and see what is and is not working.

Bad news, guys. Map 23 Detachment was corrupted when doombuilder crashed during a save. I am not willing to start over seeing how long it took to get where I was. If I cannot restore the map, it is likely I won't be able continue. For file size it is reading 1 KB, so I'm guessing the whole damn thing was wiped.

Shadow Dweller said:
Nothing. None of them work. At this point it looks like the level's screwed.

I don't know, I can try to re-build, 'cause I really don't want to abandon the project. Not like this anyway.

I still remember the layout of the map. That's a start. Hopefully it won't take as long to build as it did at first.

If you're using Vista and it's error 5, that overwrites all of the backups with null memory locations as well. The only thing I can think of is if you run regular backups of your harddrive, you can use those to restore all your files to a previous state. I backup my computer like once a week just in case of the unforeseen event.

This is the annoying-as-all-hell Doombuilder/Vista bug. To make sure that this doesn't happen again, kill the explorer.exe process using Task Manager once you've got DB running. It'll have no problems saving after that. When you are finished mapping, hit CTRL-ALT-DEL, select Task Manager, and then click File/New Task and enter explorer.exe to get your desktop back again.

alien8 said:
This is the annoying-as-all-hell Doombuilder/Vista bug. To make sure that this doesn't happen again, kill the explorer.exe process using Task Manager once you've got DB running. It'll have no problems saving after that. When you are finished mapping, hit CTRL-ALT-DEL, select Task Manager, and then click File/New Task and enter explorer.exe to get your desktop back again.

It's a shame that Codeimp refuses to fix this problem for DB1.

Here's something further that I do as well. As stated, it's annoying-as-hell not having a desktop. I simply leave explorer.exe running until I encounter the error. This will overwrite your map and its backups with null memory locations. Once this happens, you can kill explorer and resave and it will rewrite your map to the file correctly. Then you can restore explorer.exe. The error 5 crash from 3D mode does not delete your map, so if you always save before entering 3D mode, you can pretty much completely ignore this error. Just make sure not to have your map open in another program like XWE at the same time, because if it gets an I/O error and error 5 at the same time, you're pretty much screwed with this method.

dutch devil said:
Why not send an email to microsoft to fix this problem, stop bugging poor old Codeimp with this :p

I don't think that anybody is 'bugging' him. I know that the Doombuilder forum has been pretty silent on this topic as of late. As much as all of us Vista users would love to see this fixed, I think that we're all looking forward to a new version of his amazing editor even more so.

Yeah, sure it's a buzzkill, but at least there's a fairly easy workaround. Unfortunately, everybody learns about it the hard way once, ha!

That's the reason why I don't rely on DB to make my backups. I have that option disabled, and make my own. I've always used the "mywadname1.wad, mywadname2.wad, etc" naming scheme, myself. Once I get to 9, I roll back around to 1 again (I figure 9 instances back should be more than enough if something goes awry and I don't catch it right away).